Yankees owner Hal Steinbrenner will never spend like his father, even if that's what fans want
al Steinbrenner speaks during a press conference at Yankees spring training at George M. Steinbrenner Field in Tampa last February. Credit: Newsday/Thomas A. Ferrara
Hal Steinbrenner did a Zoom call with Yankees reporters on Monday at the same time that David Stearns did one with Mets reporters.
Stearns had something to discuss: the shocking trade of Brandon Nimmo to the Rangers for Marcus Semien.
Steinbrenner really didn’t have anything to discuss. Not anything new, anyway. The Yankees changed baserunning coaches. Otherwise, the moves they are going to make to improve the team that got knocked out in the Division Series by the eventual American League champion Blue Jays have yet to happen.
Why did Steinbrenner hop on the Zoom? Because it’s customary for this owner to take questions heading into the winter, both to recap what happened in 2025 and to look ahead to what might happen in 2026. Monday just happened to be the day.
Steinbrenner graciously does it even though he doesn’t have to. (Cough, cough, Steve Cohen hasn’t held any kind of news conference since the Mets’ season ended without a playoff berth, though he did post an apology on X and also has made a few snarky comments on that platform formerly known as Twitter.)
There wasn’t much baseball talk on the Steinbrenner Zoom. Most of the questions were about money. As in, do the Yankees spend enough of it?
“First question of the day,” Steinbrenner said. “My goodness.”
Let’s get this out of the way: He is not cheap. If you think that, you’re mistaken.
But he also is not a reckless spender as his father was before him (with varying degrees of success, although the many down years during the reign of George Steinbrenner seem to have been forgotten).
The Yankees are always among the leaders in payroll, but since 2009 they haven’t been No. 1 in what matters, which is winning the World Series. So fans look for answers, and the Yankees not spending up to their revenues angers some of them.
Here are the numbers, according to Forbes: The Yankees are valued at $8.2 billion. That’s tops in baseball. The Yankees in 2024 had revenues of $728 million, and that might have stayed flat in 2025 because the Yankees made the World Series in 2024 and didn’t in 2025.
According to Steinbrenner, the Yankees’ payroll in 2025 was $319 million. So let’s say their revenues again were about $728 million. Why is there a $400 million gap between what the Yankees take in and what they spend? Wouldn’t spending more lead to World Series trophy No. 28 instead of year after year of falling short?
Here are the relevant answers from Steinbrenner:
*** “If there’s a correlation between spending the most money and winning a championship, I still think it’s a weak correlation.”
*** “The team was good enough to win a championship, but they’ve got to play up to their potential. The Blue Jays did and we didn’t . . . The Toronto series was on the players. It’s on the players’ shoulders, period.”
*** Playing well in the postseason “is a bit of a crapshoot.”
*** On the 2026 payroll: “Would it be ideal if I went down? Of course. But does that mean it’s going to happen? Of course not.”
*** And, finally, when asked if it is fair to say the Yankees made a profit in 2025, Steinbrenner said: “No, it’s not fair, actually. Don’t want to get into it, but that’s not a fair statement or an accurate statement. Everybody wants to talk about revenues. They need to talk about our expenses . . . Nobody spends more money, I don’t believe, on player development, scouting, performance science. So these all start to add up, and if you want to go look at the revenues, you’ve got to somehow try to figure out the expense side as well. You might be surprised.”
You might be! But the Yankees are a private company, and they don’t have to disclose their full financial picture, just a snippet of it to satisfy their reporting obligations for the bonds that built Yankee Stadium.
So you’ll just have to take Steinbrenner’s word on it.
Frankly, it doesn’t matter if the Yankees make a profit or not. It matters if they spend near the top of the sport (which they do) and if they spend wisely (which they often do not).
Remember, the free-spending Dodgers were an Isiah Kiner-Falefa toe away from not winning the most recent World Series. Can’t get more crapshootish than that.
Yankees fans want Steinbrenner and Brian Cashman to assemble the best roster possible and for Aaron Boone to guide that roster to the Canyon of Heroes.
Every year.
Is that too much to ask?
Doesn’t matter. That’s the legacy Steinbrenner inherited along with the team. He gets it. He’s just never going to be George, for better or worse.
Anthony Rieber covers baseball, as well as the NFL, NBA and NHL. He has worked at Newsday since Aug. 31, 1998, and has been in his current position since July 5, 2004.
